(06-14-2016, 02:41 AM)Galen Wrote:(06-14-2016, 02:33 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Low-skilled manufacturing and even service jobs are being automated out of existence as soon as a machine or a computer program can be found to replace them. So it is for welding and painting on assembly lines for vehicles and appliances; so it is becoming for counter people in fast-food places. Finding people who can show delight in working for a near-minimum wage despite a miserable life off the job (poverty is incompatible with human happiness) is far tougher than it seems.
Wages aren't the only thing that raises the cost of hiring people but also government regulations that push up the costs and increase the risk of lawsuits. This combination of things is making the upfront cost of capital for the machines versus the cost of people is what is driving this trend.
Prospective employers typically ask about outside organizations in which one participates (but those practically identifying a religion are exempt, so membership in the Westboro Baptist Church is unlikely to be a bar against employment as might be membership in the Communist Party of the USA. Show any sympathy for unions and you can be fired in many places. Even membership in an organization associated with a time-consuming hobby (be an amateur astronomer, and such might keep one from getting work with a company that might ask one to work at night) might be an effective bar, let alone membership in the NAACP. Prospective employers can check credit records and histories of lawsuits; people who have made lawsuits might do so against an employer. Not since the 1920s have employers had more power over workers. There has never been a better time to be a shareholder or executive than in America today, at least since 1929. Big Business sees the prospects
Big business is all powerful. The only alternative is to be self-employed, which requires that one be a business owner or at least a consultant, or to be a government employee (which has civil service protections). We Americans live in what may be the purest plutocracy on Earth without it being an outright kleptocracy.
...As for regulations -- many of those are simply good practice. Work around certain chemicals, and there will be regulations, even if those are employers' impositions. So it is with hexavalent chromium. Of course there is always a temptation to use cheap labor under dangerous circumstances when consequences for hurting it is slight.
Big business likes its labor cheap, expendable, submissive, and atomized -- and is doing everything possible to get its way. The ideal employee is someone who lives in such miserable circumstances that overtime would be an escape from a crowded apartment or trailer. Why do you think it supports the most reactionary of politicians?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.